In recent years, there have widely spread multifunction printer apparatuses (hereinafter referred to also as MFP) which have an image reading portion (scanner portion) and an image recording portion (printer portion), and can effect copying by a simplex, or can print image data inputted from a digital camera by an apparatus simplex without requiring a host computer or the like.
In such an MFP, and particularly an MFP having a scanner, there is known a mechanism adapted to be capable of designating any image from among a number of image data by a simple operation by the use of a so-called order sheet, and effecting the printing of any number of sheets (for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2002-305701).
Printing using this kind of order sheet is effected by the following procedure.
(1) As shown in FIG. 1 of the accompanying drawings, plural sets of the thumb-nails 102 of the photographed image data of a digital camera recorded on a recording medium mounted on the apparatus, and a mark sheet column 101 which can designate each thumb-nail 102 by a mark form (or further an image ID 103) are arranged side by side, and are printed as an order sheet.
(2) A user effects marking on the mark sheet column 101 of the order sheet by a pencil or the like, and designates which image is to be printed by how many sheets.
(3) The order sheet is read by the scanner of the MFP, and the mark given by the user is recognized by the MFP, to thereby recognize which image data in the recording medium the marked image is, and that image data is printed by the designated number of sheets.
When as shown in FIG. 1, marking (black circle in the mark sheet column 101) has been made, the image of image ID 100-0001, the image of image ID 100-0005 and the image of image ID 100-0011 are printed by one sheet, two sheets and two sheets, respectively.
Such an order sheet as shown in FIG. 1 is difficult to reuse after the user has once effected marking and therefore, is used only once and then thrown away. That is, even when the user desires to print the same photographed image as the last one, it is necessary to print the same order sheet again, and this leads to the waste of resources and time.
Also, in order that the user may choose, and designate an image he wants to print from among all images preserved in the recording medium, it is necessary to print the thumb-nails of all image data in the recording medium as an order sheet, but when the number of images contained in the recording medium is very great, the number of order sheets becomes great in proportion thereto, and this leads to the problem that the waste of resources and time also becomes correspondingly great.